Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
Hegemony7.The image of US domination is complete fantasy – it relies on a unattainable wholeness of America and a process of violent Othering. The process of identity formation in opposition to other states causes scapegoating and turns the caseSolomon ’15 (Ty, Assistant Prof. @ U. of Glasgow, “The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses,” University of Michigan Press, January, 2015, pp.192-196) Rather than acknowledging the possibility that the ambiguity of subjectivity cannot be overcome, the prospect of American global domination offers a fantasy that channels the desire for subjectivity in a direction that promises a lack of absolutely nothing for “America.” Yet both this image of American global domination and the discursive attempts to pin down what the nation is missing are fantasy objects—partial manifestations of object a that indeed never existed but are posited to have existed and whose presumed absence sparks the desire for the recovery of the enjoyment that they seem to promise.9 While articulating that what America lacks constitutes the potential source of global chaos, other aspects of the discourse soften the impact of this potential source of global disintegration. Whereas Krauthammer emphasized unipolarity for unipolarity's sake, without giving too much gravity to potential threats or others, Kristol and Kagan’s text is replete with other potential obstacles to enjoyment. Kristol and Kagan offer up a variety of “rogue states” and other entities that join with national weakness to become threats on the horizon.1° China and Iran, for example, appear frequently as states that likely will not accede to the international rules that the US lays down or adopt American values. “Whether or not the United States continues to grant most-favored-nation status to China is less important” for Kristol and Kagan (I996: 23) “than whether it has an overall strategy for containing, influencing, and ultimately seeking to change the regime in Beijing.” America should develop a missile defense system capable of “shielding, say, Los Angeles from nuclear intimidation by the Chinese during the next crisis in the Taiwan Strait” (25). The greater defense capabilities the US builds up, the “less chance there is that countries like China or Iran will entertain ambitions of upsetting the present world order”—a world order defined by American principles (2 6). Spreading American influence abroad “means not just supporting U.S. friends and gently pressuring other nations but actively pursuing policies—in Iran, Cuba, or China, for instance—ultimately intended to bring about a change of regime” (28). And more broadly, Kristol and Kagan fear that given America’s indifference toward foreign affairs, it “may no longer have the wherewithal to defend against threats to America’s vital interests in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, much less to extend America’s current global preeminence well into the future” (24). In one sense, figures such as China and Iran constitute Others against which American “identity” is defined. We are benevolent, while they are aggressive. We spread our universal values to the benefit of all, while they spread fear and threaten peaceful nations. We construct world order, they wantonly seek to undermine it. This illustrates what many IR identity theorists have pointed out—that identity depends on an Other for its definition. Weldes (I9 99: 220), for example, argues that “identity and difference are mutually constitutive: there is always a politics of identity through which identity and difference are defined in tandem.” In this View, it is perhaps not terribly surprising that Kristol and Kagan’s discourse aided in enhancing neoconservative traction during the later I99os. Their discourse produces a series of Others against which “American” identity is defined, and consequently these “foreign policy problems allow for the articulation and reatticulation of relations of identity/difference as a means of both constituting and securing state identity” (220). However, the present analysis demonstrates that this process of Othering is itself made possible and sustained by the movements of lack, desire, and enjoyment—the key factors that are mostly neglected in IR identity frame- works. Beyond the mere construction of “us” and “them,” in a more fundamental sense the incompleteness of the collective subject of Kristol and Kagan’s discourse is projected onto the figures of these states. The key notion here is, again, that the subject is a subject of lack. Subjects are always already decentered and disjointed. The movements of lack and anticipated wholeness—and how the subject is produced as dealing with these ambiguities—are the condition of possibility of Self-Other relations. Lack is dealt with through the fantasy implied in their discourse. In Kristol and Kagan’s discourse, the entire world under America's protective and benevolent wing would be peaceful and largely free of antagonism, tension, and conflict if not for nonconforming states such as China, Iraq, and Iran. Yet rather than Others whose objective presence is deemed threatening, the figures of China, Iran, and others patch up the contingent fantasy of American global supremacy. The fantasy of American security, which is the fantasy of global conformity to American “universal” values, is, like all fantasies, an impossible project. Fantasy offers a way to deal with this contingency through a discourse that attempts to cover over the incompleteness of subject formation and the perpetual unfulfillment of desire for enjoyment. On one hand, Kristol and Kagan offer a neoconservative vision of American global control, while on the other hand, we have the ontological impossibility of such a social totality. What accounts for this discursive discrepancy? The sole answer offered by the discourse is “rogue states” such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Yet, according to the dynamics of desire analyzed here, world order is not prevented by rogue states, but from the impossibility of “fully” constructing such an entity. In other words, the spark of desire stems from the incompleteness of the subject itself, which in turn gives rise to fantasy and Othering: The point is not that “we” are nothing but the drive to annihilate the antagonistic force that prevents us from achieving our full identity. Rather, the antagonistic force is held responsible for the blockage of our full identity, and this permits the externalization of our constitutive lack as subjects to the negating Other, which thus becomes the positive embodiment of our self-blockage. As a result our political actions will tend to be guided by the illusion that the annihilation of the antagonistic force will permit us to become the fully constituted “we” that we have always sought to be. (Torfing 1999: 128-29) This balancing act within fantasy drives much of the identification appeal of Kristol and Kagan’s discourse. While they argue that American internal “weakness,” “mood,” “indifference,” and the like must be confronted with appropriate programs of increased militarization and more nationalistic spectacles (signified by “our” need to more fully adhere to “honor,” “exceptionalism,” “national greatness,” and so on), the coherence of the discourse rests on a fantasy in which a localizable set of Others—“rogue states”—constitute the sole obstacles on which the inescapable contingency and incompleteness of American global domination can be projected. It is not the possibility that America’s values may not in fact be universal, nor is it the possibility that the rest of the world may not welcome with open arms American “benevolent hegemony.” It is not that “we,” the subject, are incapable of fully embracing our enjoyment because of the impossibility of its full experience. It is, as the fantasy rationalizes, a relatively small group of Others that impedes American total global hegemony. They pose an obstacle to our wholeness. If not for these Others, the US and the world would reclaim the mythical wholeness of enjoyment. The fantasy in fact presupposes that the subject was unified before the missing object was lost. Again, Kristol and Kagan remember the days when Reagan summoned the full potential of American spiritual and military might, stared down the Soviet Union, and won the Cold War for the side of freedom. They recall even further in the past, when Theodore Roosevelt inspired Americans to embrace their global responsibilities. Together, both of these leaders “celebrated American exceptionalism” (1996: 32). Thus, the fantasy blames others while simultaneously offering the promise of enjoyment as something missing for which to strive. This double movement within fantasy (an Other to blame and a missing yet promised “sublime object,” both of which are negotiations with lack and in- completeness) is key to tracing the discursive efficacy here. As Yannis Stavrakakis (I999: 82) points out, this “fantasmatic element is crucial for the desirability of all [such] discourses, in other words for the hegemonic appeal.” America is missing something that it had during both Roosevelt’s and Reagan's times (partially symbolized by terms such as moral clarity, American principles, honor, national greatness, and so on). The fantasy itself retroactively constructs what it says was lost, a unity that never was. The subject’s loss drives the desire for reclaiming that which is perceived to have been lost (the indefinable object a), and Kristol and Kagan offer a neoconservative fantasy that explains what the subject must do to once again reach wholeness. Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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